It can seem strange, from the outside, that a distributor would turn away a buyer who's ready to pay. Surely more orders is always better? In practice, distributors who care about their long-term relationships with brands vet who they sell to just as carefully as they vet who they buy from, because who ends up with the stock matters almost as much as the stock itself.
Vetting isn't just risk management for the brand or distributor: it directly protects every other buyer in the network. If unvetted buyers can access the same stock at the same terms regardless of what they do with it, the pricing and positioning work that legitimate buyers rely on falls apart quickly (see our piece on pricing protection for more on how that plays out). A properly vetted network means every buyer in it has some assurance that everyone else is playing by the same rules.
None of this needs to be adversarial. A buyer who can clearly answer a few honest questions (what's your business, what do you sell, where, and roughly what volume are you expecting) usually moves through vetting quickly. It's the buyers who are vague about these basics, or reluctant to answer them at all, who tend to raise questions.
We review every application ourselves, directly: there's no automated approval process. It's slower than a self-serve signup, but it means every trade buyer in our network has actually been looked at by a person, not just a payment check. Given how much of what we do depends on pricing discipline being genuinely respected across the network, this isn't a step we're willing to skip.